Economic Sophisms by Frédéric Bastiat: Counting the Buyer the Argument Left Out

Economic Sophisms answers the protectionist arguments of 1840s France with one recurring correction: every person sells one thing and buys many, so a policy judged from the seller's side alone leaves the buyer off the account. Frédéric Bastiat published the two series in 1845 and 1848, and this 1873 edition from Oliver and Boyd in Edinburgh and Simpkin, Marshall in London gives their thirty-nine chapters in Patrick James Stirling's translation from the fifth French edition. Dialogues, mock petitions, fables and small sums carry the correction into trade statistics, employment, privilege and military metaphor, and the First Series conclusion admits the resulting repetition.

In the first chapter, a producer gains as a seller when what he offers is scarce, and as a buyer when everything else is abundant. Protectionist reasoning, in Bastiat's account, extends the seller's wish to the whole nation until artificial scarcity passes for national wealth, and the candlemakers' petition against the sun carries the wish to its comic limit. Bastiat accepts that a protected producer can lose when competition arrives. He contests the step that converts that producer's loss into a national loss by dropping the buyers who now pay less, and the introduction accepts moderate revenue duties while rejecting protective ones.

Trade statistics conceal the same omission. In First Series VI, a merchant ships 200,000 francs of goods and brings home a cargo the customhouse values at 352,000 francs. His books record a profit, while the tables show imports exceeding exports, and a deputy concludes that France is dissipating its capital. A second cargo sinks, so the tables enter 200,000 francs of exports with no return, and balance-of-trade reasoning must count the wreck as national profit. Bastiat draws the opposite rule: once costs are counted, a profitable exchange brings home more than it sent, the balance should be read in reverse, and goods a foreigner sent for nothing would benefit the country. The aggregate takes its meaning from the transactions beneath it.

The employment argument receives the same correction. In the Second Series chapter Something Else, Robinson and Friday compare six hours of hunting with three hours of growing vegetables to exchange for game. Exchange yields the same provisions for nine hours in place of twelve, and the freed hours go to another want or to rest; in Bastiat's view nobody has to name the new occupation to know that the means for it exist. He then extends the island reasoning to commerce conducted through money and separates reduced work caused by deprivation from reduced work caused by satisfied wants, a distinction no job count can draw.

The Second Series opening chapter asks why protectionist reasoning survives. Privileges redirect other people's services through force or deception, then gain the protection of law and accepted morality, and they last partly because the public reads their costs as benefits. Beneficiaries can hold the error as sincerely as victims. The next chapter takes from J. B. Say the contrast between reforming Tartuffe and improving Orgon's judgment. Religious and philosophical morality works on the person who does harm, while economic understanding lets the person harmed recognize it and resist; Bastiat wants both. In his scheme, each fallacy understood weakens a privilege that depends on its victims misreading their losses.

The closing chapter, Domination by Labour, takes on the military vocabulary of trade, answering the fear that England invites free competition to stifle Continental industry. Bastiat follows cheap foreign iron past the ironmasters to the people who use it. France obtains tea, coffee, gold and silver by exchange with less labor than producing them would take, and if Belgium and England sent iron for nothing, some blast furnaces would close while more profitable branches rose to absorb the labor. In war the stronger overcomes the weaker; in industry, he argues, superiority means cheapness for the buyer, which makes domination by labor a contradiction in terms. The same chapter allows that transition causes momentary derangement, a reason to proceed gently and gradually. In the earlier chapter National Independence, Bastiat answers wartime dependence on foreign iron and coal by noting that dependence runs both ways, giving each trading partner a reason to keep exchange open.

The 1873 scan is held by the Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg has a text of the same translation. PDF copies of the same scan can be downloaded from Towards Liberty and 24242.io.